When my partners and I wanted to create an LLC, we turned to a friend who is an attorney to help us with proper documentation.  If you live in the U.S.A., you may have seen advertisements for corporations like, Legalzoom or Legal Shield. They provide downloadable legal documents, for a price. Granted, the price is much less than a law firm might charge. (Even less than our friend charged.)

These documents earn wealth for their creators specifically because they are proprietary.

Think of it. Legal code is an intellectual product created by the government for public benefit. Yet, it can only be distributed in the form of a  product owned by private law firms.

Stated another way, law is much like proprietary software.

But what if legal were like an operating system? What if it was open-sourced, and transparent. What if anyone could navigate legal systems? What if the operating system worked in most every language?

This is the goal of Common Accord

If you’d like to help make this happen, check out Common Accord’s Slack group or their Conference at MIT.

Extracted from: https://github.com/CommonAccord/Cmacc-Org/commit/be62562f4cc2d0d241512850f12598b21a8e509f

CmAQuick.sec=CommonAccord is an initiative to create global codes of legal transacting by codifying and automating legal documents, including contracts, permits, organizational documents, and consents. We anticipate that there will be codes for each jurisdiction, in each language. For international dealings and coordination, there will be at least one “global” code. {CCL.Link}

Conference.sec=We are co-organizing a conference at MIT Media Lab – May 23-24: Conference Program

Slack.sec=Join our Slack group!

Codification.sec=Codification of legal form documents makes them transparent and continuously improving. It is part of the tradition of legal codification – from Hammurabi through Napoleon, the UCC, the ALI, and Creative Commons. Codification demystifies law and encourages transparency and autonomy.

Extracted from http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001556.html

CommonAccord are basically doing the same thing described – wrapping together a smart contract with a legal document and then creating some form of identifier out of it when they produce their final contract.

Extracted from – http://www.commonaccord.org/index.php?action=doc&file=S/About/CCL/0.md

Proposal – Center for Collaborative Law

1. Problem
   Transacting is slow, insecure, uncertain and expensive.

1. Problems of payment, clearing, automation and interoperability are being addressed by the FinTech and open source communities, notably in blockchain implementations.
2. Legal compliance and optimization remain slow, uncertain and expensive.
3. Data privacy and security remain weak.
4. Centralization creates systemic risks.
5. Legal codification is slow and fragmented.

• Solution
  Add open-source codified legal documents to blockchain automation platforms:

1. Codify legal documents and records using the “Cmacc” data model and the tools of open source;
2. Iterate a legal “object model” to describe persons, properties, places, transactions and relationships; and
3. Add a layer of user-managed access control.
4. Integrate with blockchain and other platforms, such as git, document management, document assembly and enterprise contract management systems.

• Impact
  
  1. Rapid legal codification.
  2. Improved speed, transparency and certainty in business dealings.
  3. Greater access to justice, rule of law and self-governance.
  4. Greater transparency of institutions.
  5. Improved outcomes for social objectives such as privacy, health, climate and decentralization.
• Sauce
  
  1. A simple record format that renders into documents and has the power of a “graph” object model with multiple prototype inheritance.
  2. A large number of sample legal document solutions.
  3. Fit with blockchain and OAuth-UMA security.
  4. Fifteen years of efforts regarding source-based legal codification.
• Status – Convergence of Blockchain, Legal and Access Security
  A number of currents are converging:
  1. Bitcoin has spurred interest in P2P transacting platforms. Among many other efforts, the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project brings together a large number of actors to agree on a common platform.
  2. CommonAccord has a data model (Cmacc) that can extend P2P solutions to all legal relationships and be a bridge for integration with legacy systems such as Word (legal), ECM and ERM.
  3. There is a strong tradition of legal codification via bar and trade groups, agencies and clinics, and now also legal “hackers”.
  4. Decentralized access control based on OAuth and related technologies is widely used and well-understood.

  The combination of Blockchain/Cmacc/Access is ripe for open-source iteration.

• Plan
  There is currently no legal structure to hold the shared legal text, which we expect to evolve into a legal operating system. Nor are there national or trade-sector equivalents. 

Photo by lafa.pixellutions